As an architect working in a virtualized server environment, you know the benefits – and new challenges – that virtualization brings to the data center. The close tie between hardware and the server and application software is removed, eliminating dependencies that made system design more complex up front, and more rigid and difficult to upgrade as applications grew over time. It’s faster to deploy new hardware, and easier to build out an environment that can be deployed and updated more quickly than ever before. Sharing resources in a virtual environment helps you be more efficient in your use of resources. But those same elements – sharing resources and abstracting applications from the underlying hardware – cause a new set of potential problems you have to carefully consider to safely share resources and keep your risks manageable in the virtualized environment.
One key thing an architect has to get right is sizing every environment. In the past, it was necessary to estimate application peaks and size for the maximum anticipated demand plus some safety factor. That resulted in a wasted capacity, but it also helped to compartmentalize each application with dedicated capacity and a buffer for excess demand. Even if an unexpected surge in demand harmed one application’s performance, it wouldn’t affect other systems. The very resource sharing that is one of the virtualization’s key benefits changes that situation dramatically. Now, unexpected demand issues can impact multiple applications. The heavier load on each physical server makes it more likely that utilization on any given server will be pushed to critical levels, harming all its VMs and applications dependent on those VM services. And resource contention may crop up even when overall demand is well within safe limits. These considerations add a new element in system architecture design: a need to establish policies about what applications can safely run together on the same physical hosts, under varying circumstances.
Once those policies are established, it is necessary to implement them, moving VMs to execute on the appropriate groups of physical servers. In a large environment, there may be substantial effort required to ensure physical servers have all the proper resources to support the VMs they will run, and to assign VMs to the appropriate hosts.
New Tools for Today’s Data Center
VMTurbo solves the new challenges that a virtual data center brings. With a powerful set of tools to help you monitor and manage today’s virtualized data center, you can safely deploy even mission-critical applications in a shared virtual environment. From monitoring to reporting issues and resolving even the most complex problems, VMTurbo solutions give you the tools you need to design systems and applications effectively, gaining the benefits of a virtualized environment while managing its unique challenges and minimizing risk.
Architecting the Virtual Infrastructure to meet future needs can be a complex and error prone process. The VMTurbo Planner provides an offline “What If” analysis capability to simplify the process of planning architecture changes. With this capability you can answer key questions such as: How many VM’s can I add to my clusters? Can I achieve better throughput by re-balancing workloads within or across clusters? How will my workloads perform on different server and storage hardware with different performance characteristics? Can I achieve better throughput by re-balancing workloads across available datastores?
As part of its analysis the Planner will also determine which servers and datastores to run workloads on, and determine where to provision or decommission server and storage capacity to best meet the objectives of the specific plan.
Assuring Performance
Optimizing Capacity
Communicating With Stakeholders
As part of its analysis the Planner will also determine which servers and datastores to run workloads on, as well determining where to provision or decommission server and storage capacity to meet the objectives of specific plans